Fogelsville Dam modification sullies creek

Bill Shimkus, who built a park-like backyard in South Whitehall Township,… (PAUL CARPENTER, THE MORNING…)

May 03, 2014|Paul Carpenter

Haasadahl Road in Lehigh County is right out of Norman Rockwell. It runs along (previously) lovely Hassen Creek from the Fogelsville area to Jordan Creek.

It is a nice road for cycling, and on my very first ride there two decades ago, I remember seeing children getting cool on a hot day by dunking themselves in the spillway waterfall from the Fogelsville Dam near Route 100.

I have not seen anyone doing that in recent years, and I certainly do not expect to see it now that the dam has been modified — unless it's somebody looking for a yucky mud bath.

Everyone knew the reservoir behind that 20-foot-high concrete dam was filled mostly with silt, and the water at the top was only a foot or two deep, but it looked nice.

In recent weeks, modifications to the dam have sent much of that silt downstream, clogging the creek and adjacent ponds, turning Norman Rockwell scenes into "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.

A few years ago, state officials started to fret that the "high hazard" dam, built in 1905 to handle water from a nearby quarry, was poorly maintained and would pose a danger if it collapsed. Lehigh County had turned the dam over to Upper Macungie Township years before that, and initial estimates from the American Society of Civil Engineers had put the repair costs between $1.5 million and $4 million.

What do engineers know? Upper Macungie officials opted for a $200,000 plan that would wind up costing the township only $55,222, thanks to a state grant. As reported in The Morning Call in December, that plan involved lowering the dam 6 feet.

I noticed a few weeks ago that work had begun and stopped to ask the workers what they were doing. They said only that they were making "improvements" to the dam.

More recently, it appeared the improvements consisted mainly of chopping away part of the top of the dam near its center. That, according to Bill Shimkus, who lives on Haasadahl Road downstream from the dam, near Jordan Creek, created a mess.

"You would have thought they'd have the courtesy to tell people downstream what they were going to do," he said, adding that his beautiful backyard pond, fed by Hassen Creek, is now filled with silt.

I first met Shimkus on a bike ride, after I spotted the marvelous things he built in his yard. I just had to stop and ask about them. It turned out he's a retired Air Force officer and he and I had worked in the same office at Kadena Air Base in Japan, at different times. I've written about the landscaping he did around his house and how he developed his pond, stocking it with fish.

I asked about the largemouth bass and bluegills in his pond since the dam revision. "I haven't seen any. If there are any alive, they won't be for long," he said. The entire pond appeared to be filled with silt, with only inches of water at the surface.

Shimkus was not the only person on Haasadahl Road who was upset.

"We had a fishing contest in the creek," said Sandi Carr, a trustee of the Guthsville Rod & Gun Club. "It was terrible."

He said that in a similar contest last year, the club stocked Hassen Creek with 354 trout for the event and the children caught more than half of them. This year they caught around 20. "The fish weren't biting because they couldn't see the bait. A steady stream of garbage was coming down," Carr said. "It's still a brown stream."

He said club officials contacted the state Fish and Game Commission about the damage to the creek, but got no response. "Legally, we cannot put a rock in that creek. … If we did something like this, they'd be down on us like a heartbeat," Carr said.

"I'm aware that there's an issue there," Game Commission spokesman Eric Levis told me, but said there were safety concerns and something had to be done about the dam. The commission "has not seen any impact on the fisheries, no dead fish," he said. "In time, it [the silt] will clear up." (It did not clear up in the reservoir, however, over the 109 years the dam was in place.)

When I asked Upper Macungie Township Supervisor Kathy Rader about complaints of inadequate notification, she said there was news coverage of plans to work on the dam. "There's not many houses downstream, and they're pretty far downstream," she said. (Shimkus is the farthest, and he's about two miles from the dam.)

As for choosing the cheaper options, Radar said the original plans involved extensive work. "If we would have breached the dam completely … we would have had to get rid of the silt," she said, "and probably rebuild Haasadahl Road." (Part of the road is supported by the dam.)

They did get rid of some of the silt. It's in Shimkus' pond and in the creek next to the gun club. And it seems to Shimkus there could have been a better warning about the imminent silt surge. He could have temporarily blocked off his pond from the creek.

I know there are bigger issues when it comes to flooding, as we've seen in recent days across the nation with true disasters. In Friday's paper, we saw how flooding hit parts of the Lehigh Valley, with photographs of overflowing Monocacy Creek in Bethlehem and Jordan Creek in Allentown.

The mud flood of Hassen Creek, however, was not an act of God. It was an act of municipal officials looking for a cheap way to deal with a dangerous old dam.